


Knife Skills

by Hark_bananas



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Bucky Barnes & Sam Wilson Friendship, Bucky Barnes gets a job, Bucky Barnes's rich interior life, Cooking, Eventual Smut, Fluff, Food, Getting Back Together, Knives, M/M, Misunderstandings, Pining, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Steve Rogers Recovery, flangst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-24
Packaged: 2021-03-26 14:42:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30107559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hark_bananas/pseuds/Hark_bananas
Summary: The money he'd stolen from Hydra has almost run out when he finds a black piece of card stock with blocky capital letters stapled to a telephone pole:FUNNEL NO. 9DO YOU HAVE KNIFE SKILLS?WE NEED YOUAnd then below, there's a phone number.Knife skills? I have knife skills, he thinks. That part is pretty self-explanatory, though he has no idea what Funnel No. 9 could mean. He doesn't really want to get back into the hitman business, but needs must, and Bucky Barnes is a practical man.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Sam Wilson, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers & Sam Wilson
Comments: 45
Kudos: 110





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is finished in its entirety and only has to undergo some light editing before posting. I can't commit to a strict posting schedule because life, but I can promise that there will never be more than a week between chapters. Tags will be updated as individual chapters are posted.
> 
> Huge thank you to my very talented beta for all the encouragement, she knows who she is.

The day Bucky finds the black card is the day he slips the purple paper sleeve off his last strap of Hydra cash, fanning the stack of twenties out between his metal fingers. It’s enough to pay the rent on his glorified squat and keep him in food for two more months, but after that, he’s going to have to do something to get money, be it legal, illegal, or somewhere in between. He pulls five twenties off the top of the stack and then puts the rest back into the otherwise-empty safe that sits nestled under the corner of his bed.

It’s May 2nd, 2016, and Bucky has been living in New York City for almost two years.

After Insight Day had turned into a disaster and the Triskelion had fallen and the helicarriers had dropped in flaming pieces out of the sky and he had almost beat Captain America to death, he had wandered around DC for a while, living rough, sleeping in alleys and doorways. Two weeks of trying to survive, trying not to kill anyone, and trying to stay away from whatever remnants of Hydra might be out there looking for their lost Asset. He was a loose thread, now, just waiting to be raveled back onto the spool by the next person with a passing knowledge of the trigger words.

 _No habits, no patterns_ , the Soldier had said, _that’s the way you keep them off your trail._ But the exhibit at the Smithsonian was a spinning reel and there was a barbed hook sunk into the meat of his jaw, a line between them drawing him inescapably in. He couldn’t help himself; he had gone, in those two weeks, again and again and again, each time in a different disguise, different clothes and a different hat. Twice, he went in the middle of the night, slipping in through a basement window and knowing, somehow, how to move so that the cameras couldn’t see him. This was how the Soldier took care of him, even if he’d figured out early on that he and the Soldier were two separate creatures. That he wasn’t the Soldier, he was something else.

He went to the Smithsonian to look at the pictures of Captain America and the Howling Commandos and Bucky Barnes, but especially to look at the film clip of Captain America and Bucky Barnes— _inseparable on both schoolyard and battlefield_ —standing against a brick wall, easy smiles on both of their faces. We ARE friends, Bucky Barnes had said, the words clearly visible on his lips, and then they’d both laughed.

It fascinated him, this easy camaraderie, the blindingly obvious friendship and the subtler depth of feeling that could be teased out of the expressions on their faces. The clip was only five seconds long, playing over and over again in a loop, but he watched it hundreds, perhaps thousands of times in the two weeks that he haunted the museum like a particularly recalcitrant ghost.

At night, huddled against a brick wall under a women’s polyfill winter coat he’d lifted from the lost and found at the museum, he thought about the video clip, the contrast between the two friends and the memory that twined its insidious fingers around him, the memory that he had sunk his metal claws into and couldn’t let go of. He only had two weeks’ worth of memories, fourteen days’ worth, three hundred thirty-six hours’ worth, twenty thousand minutes’ worth; less if you discounted the time he spent asleep. Each memory was a flake of gold leaf which, melted all together in the crucible of his mind, might eventually be enough to mint the coin of a new self.

So as much as he hated it, he couldn’t bring himself to want to forget the memory of beating Captain America half to death on the shattered deck of the helicarrier, the crunch of the bone under his fist, the split in the soft, pink lip that dripped red blood, and the blue eye surrounded by a purpling bruise, almost swelled shut but still gazing at the Fist of Hydra and seeing someone else, instead.

_You’re my mission._

_Then finish it._

Two weeks after the Triskelion, he woke up early one morning before the sun had properly begun to rise and before the park he was sleeping in came awake in a glorious riot of birdsong, knowing, without knowing how he knew, that the time for thinking was over and that the time for doing was nigh. He couldn’t wait around any longer for them to come find him; he was going to find them first.

So began a month-long tour of destruction up and down the east coast of the United States, from DC to Atlanta to Charlotte to DC again, then up to Philadelphia, over to Pittsburgh, and finally, to New York, hitting dozens of out-of-the-way bases in between.

On his way out of DC, he stole a nondescript sedan from a parking garage, he stole a change of clothes from a thrift store, he stole a length of tubing from a hardware store and gas from the tank of another car in the parking lot. He stole whatever he needed, in fact, because he had no money, at least not until he took down the first base and cleaned out their safe, plus their weapons cache and their closet full of tactical gear, for good measure.

He wasn’t reckless about enacting his vengeance, exactly, but he no longer felt the compulsion, underscored by his programming, to keep his equipment in tip-top shape, either. Not only did he no longer have handlers to punish him for damaging equipment that belonged to Hydra, but he had to figure out for himself for the first time how to keep his equipment— _body_ , his _body_ , he had to remind himself constantly—in good condition. The first time he broke the fifth metacarpus of his right hand when a punch landed badly, he pushed the bone back into position until it no longer crunched and then went about his business for the next few days. He still knew how to cut the pain off so that it wouldn’t distract him from his mission, but eventually it occurred to him that if the bone set badly, he would have to rebreak it and then wait for it to heal properly before he could resume his tour of destruction.

He drove back into the city he’d just left, walked into the sketchiest looking club he could find, and slid a hundred-dollar bill across the wet bar top. The bartender pocketed the bill without even looking up, and when he asked for the name of a discreet doctor who accepted cash, a phone number jotted down on the back of a receipt was pushed back at him with no more fanfare than if he’d asked for a napkin.

He got his hand set properly, the serum did the rest, and in a few days, he was on the road again.

Food was a little more difficult. The equipment—the _body_ —needed a constant supply of energy, which he already knew. Of course he knew—even when he was the Asset, he’d had to supply his body with all of that energy, himself, via his mouth. None of the technicians who did equipment maintenance were stupid enough to get that close to his teeth. But when it wasn’t handed to him ready-made in a tube, procuring the right things to provide energy in the right proportions to other macronutrients was a fucking nightmare. And when he started to regain his sense of taste, round about Atlanta? He almost wished for nutrient paste again. Almost.

He was constantly hungry, or at least what he thought he’d identified as hunger, a grinding, gnawing sensation in the pit of his stomach like his body was a millstone reducing his guts to dust. At first, he ate everything he could lay his hands on from the gas stations where he stopped to fill up the tank of the stolen sedan. Sleeves of dry crackers and packages of doughy chocolate chip cookies and Snickers, so many Snickers they glued his teeth together. Salt and vinegar chips that peeled the skin off the inside of his mouth. Beef jerky, like eating his own boots. Sometimes he threw it all back up in the gutter, but sometimes it stayed down long enough to be converted into energy, which filled him with an unfamiliar sense of buoyant satiety as alarming as it was desirable.

Once and only once, sometime after Atlanta, he picked up something called a hot pickle in a pouch. It was, confusingly, not hot. It was room temperature at best, even cold, having been sitting since the world was new in a bin in a gas station that was air-conditioned half to death even at the end of April. It bobbled sickeningly inside its plastic pouch, swimming in a pool of its own juices like the pallid green ghost of a monstrous, disembodied penis.

He managed to spill half of the sour-smelling juice on himself when he squeezed the pouch too hard in alarm, and then when he took the first bite, he immediately realized his mistake. This was not supposed to be a hot pickle. This was a _spicy_ pickle, and the inside of his mouth was on fire.

He was the Soldier, though, right? He could just turn off the pain.

He could not, however, turn off the smell of the pickle juice, so while he normally would have slept in his car in some out-of-the-way turnabout off the main roads, he was forced to check into a motel with some of his Hydra cash and the ID of—he had to look at the name as he was handing it over because he hadn’t thought to do that first; jesus, was he getting sloppy, or was it the pickle juice fumes?—Kevin Bunsen, unfortunate Hydra IT guy. There was a creaky washer and dryer on the premises that operated on a steady stream of quarters, and he washed his pickle-y clothes along with everything else he’d been living in for weeks. At least Hydra wouldn’t smell him coming, now. The element of surprise was important.

Eventually, he had raided enough bases and destroyed enough equipment that he could breathe a little easier and could walk down the street without feeling the imagined prickling of eyes on the back of his neck. He felt like he could take a break. Whatever remnants of Hydra still existed surely had to know who was behind the sacking of all their East Coast bases, and the legitimate authorities were sure to notice if he kept it up any longer. It was time for a sabbatical, to take a little time off and think about what he was going to do next.

So he squatted in New York for a while, first in Manhattan and then in Queens, before he found a tiny little apartment on the top floor of a skinny little house on McDonald Avenue in Gravesend, sandwiched between a body shop and a shady medical supplies distributor that never seemed to be open. In his methodical, Soldier way, he broke into it one night, just to make sure that it wasn’t a front for something that was going to draw the attention of people who didn’t need to be reminded of his existence. But it looked like a legitimate medical-supply business, with stacks of boxes of rubber gloves and surgical masks. Probably not entirely legitimate, he figured, but whatever side business they had going on was something petty, like the way Anton, the guy who owned the body shop, paid most of his employees under the table. Small-time crime, nobody gets hurt, nobody’s interested in looking behind the curtain, nobody wants to ask the neighbors any questions.

The F train ran on its elevated tracks right in front of his living-room windows, but he was only a block and a half from the nearest stop, and it was easy enough to get used to the _click clack screech_ of the subway passing by. The apartment was little more than a closet with a smaller closet where he slept, but there was enough space in the main room for the sofa left by the last tenant, and in the bedroom, a double bed pushed up against the one drafty window left enough room for one bedside table and a broken-down garment rack that he used as a closet. There was a matchbox-sized bathroom and a grimy kitchenette that had a two-burner stove, an oven barely big enough to roast a chicken, and a minifridge. It was small, drafty, noisy, freezing in the winter and boiling in the summer, but for the first time he could ever remember, he had something that might someday deserve the name ‘home.’

He bought a pillow, something called memory foam that felt like laying his head to sleep in the lap of god. He bought a frying pan and a spatula and then a knife, a _kitchen_ knife. The distinction made the Soldier sneer in the back of his mind, but Bucky found that cutting meat with his fighting knives tended to make him think of other flesh he’d cut with the same knives, and that compromised his still-new ability to keep solid food down long enough for digestion to happen.

He found a book on a park bench, something called _The Big Book of Science Fiction,_ and read it from cover to cover, staying up one entire night and half of the next to finish it. Then he found a bookcase in a dumpster that wouldn’t fall over if he kept one side of it propped up with a wedge of wood. He bought a pot of mint and kept it on the windowsill beside his bed, where he could reach over and brush his fingers against it, flooding the tiny bedroom with the smell of sweet green living things.

A few more bits and pieces of furniture and other home goods, and eventually he had something that looked like a home and felt like a home ( _and quacked like a home_ , some little faraway voice had peeped, nonsensically, in a remote corner of his mind). Finally, he could stop living as if he were five minutes from fleeing the country. He could stop weighing every action against its probable equal and opposite reaction, and he began to learn how to care for himself.

He graduated from gas station fare to bodegas to proper groceries; he tried yogurt and carrots and raisins for the first time. Every morning, he got up when his body told him to and jumped the first hurdle of the day, that thing called ‘breakfast.’ At first, he ate Cheerios because he found them in the grocery store under a sign marked ‘Breakfast Cereal.’ But Cheerios were dry and bland, and even when he poured milk over them like the picture on the front of the box, something told him he could be doing better. After a little bit of research, he moved on to oatmeal or toast with butter. Then, gradually, he began to incorporate honey and peanut butter, and then some diced fresh fruit, and then the supermarket bread was replaced by brioche from the good bakery, and sometimes croissants, or eggs and bacon, or an omelet loaded with vegetables.

After breakfast, he took a shower and did whatever the equipment—the _body_ ; he slipped up, sometimes, even months into this new, piecemeal personhood—needed in order to feel clean and good and taken care of. He washed his hair, trimmed his fingernails, shaved the stubble that invariably darkened his jaw again before the sun went down, and dressed in clean, soft underwear, worn-in thrift-store jeans, and some kind of natural-fiber shirt.

It’s not that the body itself demanded these items, but he remembered the Soldier’s tactical clothing, the straps that bit, the seams that chafed, and the mask that left him breathing his own stale, recycled air, hour after hour and chapped his lips until they cracked and bled, the mortification of the flesh. After almost three months away from Hydra, after one month of destroying everything that came within reach of the long metal arm of the Soldier, it might have seemed that in the grand scheme of things, the urge to take care of the body and feed it things that tasted good and dress it in soft clothes was an insignificant rebellion, the damp fizzle of an out-of-date firework. But he knew better.

As his flake-of-gold-leaf memories came back, memories from before, from when he was James Buchanan Barnes and he lived in Brooklyn with Steven Grant Rogers, he found out that he’d always been the kind of person who liked soft, nice things, and good, rich food, and a clean, sweet-smelling body. Maybe it was insignificant, but it had all the power of a thunderclap, his self returning to fill a vacuum that, for seventy years, he had not even known was there.

The memories were a problem, though. They trickled back one by one, sometimes in bits and pieces, prompted by a smell or a sound, sometimes appearing out of the blue in their entirety, like a reel of film thrust roughly into his unwilling arms.

Maybe it was a normal thing that happened to real people, to remember the time when they were thirteen and their best friend was so sick that his ma called the priest in because she thought he was going to die, and they thought they were going to die, too, they were so afraid. And then, when they remember it for the first time in seventy years, to feel that fear again so sharp and so painful, like a fist to the gut, that they have to run to the toilet and vomit until their stomach is empty.

It probably wasn’t normal, though, and it wasn’t conducive to the insignificant rebellion of making his body feel good, so he did what any real person would probably do and took every golden memory of Steve Rogers as it surfaced and folded it into quarters, and then folded that into quarters, and then folded that into quarters one last time, until it was smaller than a one-penny postage stamp. And then he stacked it neatly with the other golden memories in an imaginary snuffbox, like the one he’d seen once in an antique store, ornate, tarnished copper with a Chinese dragon embossed on the front. And when the snuffbox was full, he shut the lid and sealed it with a drip of solder and then dropped it into the fathomless black lagoon that lived at the very bottom of his heart.


	2. Chapter 2

He folds the five twenties into his beat-up leather wallet and slips it into the back pocket of his jeans and then shrugs on the black leather moto jacket that hangs on the hook beside the door. Two knives go into sheaths strapped around his torso, and he slips one more into the stock of each of his tall combat boots. He picks up his phone and its loose SIM card from the bookshelf and drops them into the pocket of his jacket, and then unlocks the door and slips out.

There’s one more apartment on the second floor of this house, facing the back, but he hardly ever sees the occupant, a short, middle-aged woman with long dark hair always tied into a neat bun on the crown of her head. Her name is Inés Sanz Diosdado, 43 years old, naturalized United States citizen born in Lima. She works two jobs, evening shift as a clerk at a Duane Reade closer to the tonier parts of Brooklyn and morning shift as a nanny for a family of five on the Upper East Side. She sends money home to her mother in Lima every month like clockwork and receives letters from Lima in return. She likes to drink cheap lager and listen to 70s-era disco with the volume turned down low.

On the ground floor lives the son of the landlord, a reclusive man named Jason Mitchell Carr, 33 years old, high-school drop-out, no job. The only mail he receives are grocery store fliers, but he likes to play video games and draw. Mostly racing cars, sometimes purebred show dogs. Bucky had tailed him once when he had, uncharacteristically, left the house during the day, and he had gone down the street and around the corner to the pet store, where he stood in front of the window looking at the puppies for five minutes before he turned around and went back home again.

He knows these things because he ran a background check on both of the other tenants, read their mail, and broke into their apartments to scope things out all within the first week of moving in. He didn’t want to do these things, not really, but the vestiges of the Soldier’s programming wouldn’t let him rest until he verified all the tenants of his building, as well as the business activities of all the body shops, car glass repair places, medical suppliers, run-down diners, and warehouses within a two-block radius of his apartment.

He locks the door behind him and walks down the stairs. The building is silent; Inés is at work in Manhattan, and Jason is either playing video games with his headphones on or has gone out to visit the puppies again.

It’s a nice day, partly sunny, not exactly warm, but not cold, either. Typical May 2nd. He decides to walk to the coffee roaster in Carroll Gardens where he buys whole beans, freshly roasted, the newest addition to the regimen of making the body feel good. He takes his time walking up McDonald Avenue, the whole length of Brooklyn, until he gets to the corner of the cemetery, where he turns left to go towards Prospect Park.

As he’s standing at the light, waiting for the red person to turn green, he looks idly over at the telephone pole to his right. Stapled up amid the usual high-tide detritus of lost pet posters, multi-level marketing scams and for-rent ads is a black piece of cardstock with blocky capital letters in white ink:

FUNNEL NO. 9

DO YOU HAVE KNIFE SKILLS?

WE NEED YOU

And then below, there is a phone number. Nothing else. Bucky rips the whole piece of cardstock off of the telephone pole and then carefully picks the staples out as he crosses the street, dropping them into a waste bin on the other side. He slides the cardstock into his pocket and wanders around Park Slope some more, what looks like a random meander to an innocent observer but is actually a carefully calculated route designed to scrape any tails off the bottom of his bootheel. He doesn’t really think he has tails—hasn’t for ages, not since coming to Brooklyn—but it’s a comforting habit.

He ends up at a little nondescript café, soothing in its predictable 21st-century potpourri of artfully mismatched tables and blackboard with the menu written in chalk pens, not actual chalk. There’s coffee and pastries, but just the usual fist-sized brownies and lacquered croissants, nothing interesting. It’s called Bluebird Café or The Daily Grind or something equally forgettable.

Once he has his human hand curled around a cup of coffee and his back to the most easily defensible corner in the place, he pulls the piece of cardstock out of his pocket and looks at it again. 

FUNNEL NO. 9

DO YOU HAVE KNIFE SKILLS?

WE NEED YOU

He has no idea what Funnel No. 9 could mean, but ‘knife skills’ is pretty self-explanatory. He definitely has knife skills, so it looks like Funnel No. 9 needs him, and he probably needs them, too.

He’s thought about it a lot in the last two years, about what he’s going to do when the money runs out. He’s thought about getting a job as a dishwasher or taking a night shift stocking shelves at a grocery store, something that doesn’t require interacting with the public. He could be a bike messenger; he’s fairly sure he knows how to ride a bike. He definitely knows how to ride a motorcycle, which can’t be _that_ different, not to mention that he’s quick and fearless and has near-unlimited stamina and would almost certainly survive if he got hit by a car. He’d thought, briefly, about going back on the hunt for Hydra, raiding more bases, maybe moving out west and starting in on whatever West Coast operations still existed. But ultimately, he doesn’t want to leave New York. It was his home many decades ago and against all odds, it’s his home, again, and there’s something about the city that keeps him there like the magnet that sticks his shopping list to the front of his minifridge.

New York is where Steve lives. Of course he’s thought about showing himself, turning himself in, letting himself be known, going back to Steve. Steve has money; he knows, he’s checked his bank accounts. Steve lives all alone in a nice brownstone in Cobble Hill, where they grew up. Steve could feed him and clothe him and give him a roof to lay his head under. But he doesn’t want to go back to Steve. Not now. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

He pulls his phone out of his pocket and takes the glove off of his human hand in order to extract the SIM card, wedged down into the deepest linty corner of his other pocket. He cracks the back of the phone and slots the SIM card in, powering the phone up and waiting for it to go through its happy-go-lucky _beep-boop_ start-up cycle. He puts in the PIN and then checks his messages. Nothing. That’s good. He has never given anyone this phone number, although he has used the phone to make calls. Every six months he tosses it in the river and gets a new phone with a new number; it used to be three months, but after so much time with so little happening, he’s scaled his security practices down a bit.

He taps the number into the keypad that pops up on the screen and takes a slurp of his lukewarm coffee while it rings. After five of what passes for rings these days, a quiet little _brrr_ like what might come out of a mechanical cat, the phone is picked up. There’s a noise of scuffling and someone laughing in the background before a man’s voice says, “Funnel number nine, yeah?”

“I’m calling about the ad,” he says, adding a little of the Soldier’s lack of inflection to his voice. Who knows what kind of people he’s going to have to impress?

“What ad? The fifty percent one? That was from last month,” the voice says.

Bucky frowns a little, narrowing his eyes. “The one about knife skills.”

“Oh fuck, yeah, that one, cool cool cool,” says the voice. “You got knife skills? When can you come in? For an interview or whatever. Like, today? Could you come today?”

“Yes,” Bucky says, thinking, _shit, these people work fast_. “When?”

“Well, where are you? We’re in Park Slope, so however long it’ll take you to get here.” He rattles off an address.

“I’ll be there in an hour,” Bucky says.

“An hour, cool cool cool,” the voice chirps. “Hey, what’s your name?”

“Jamie,” he says. “Jamie Ross.” It’s one of the names he gives out, especially for when he wants people to underestimate him. Nobody, not the cops, not the mafia, not Hydra, nobody expects some guy who calls himself Jamie to be capable of mass murder.

“Awesome, Jamie, see you in an hour,” the guy says, and Bucky hangs up without saying goodbye.

He finishes his coffee in one gulp and then takes his ceramic mug up to the counter. The girl at the register gives him a grateful grin, and he never can make his face smile at strangers, but he nods. Then he pushes by the tables and the strollers and the people milling around between them to the bathroom that’s at the back of the little café. The mirror is tarnished, lit by a bulb that manages to be both dim and harshly fluorescent at the same time, but it’s good enough to look himself over in the mirror. Long hair, clean and combed, but not fashionable or obviously flattering. He hadn’t shaved that morning, so his jaw is peppered with stubble. Black leather jacket, obviously well-worn and not fashionable, either. Black jeans, black boots, and the hidden knives scattered all around his person. He looks like he could be anything, within reason—most anything in the bottom strata of society. Need an errand boy? An assassin? A bouncer? A mechanic’s grunt assistant? That guy in the mirror is your man.

He looks at his hair again, not sure if he should tuck it behind his ears or let it hang in his face. Finally, he decides to put it up in a bun and combs it back from his face with his fingers, twisting it into a tail at the crown of his head and securing it in a roll with two black elastics that he pulls off his wrist. His ears are pierced, the left lobe and the right cartilage, and he likes the way his hair in a bun and the visible piercings make him look softer, automatically easier to underestimate. That guy in the mirror, it’s hard to tell whether he’s more inclined to slit your throat or to blow you in a back alley, and that’s just the way Bucky likes it.

* * *

He walks past the front of the building twice. It’s on a busy side street, lots of people in bright athletic wear pushing three-wheeled strollers, others with obvious bedhead carrying babies in complicated harnesses strapped to their chests. There are cyclists everywhere, and generic Brooklyn foot traffic. It’s the worst place that a business who needs a specialist in knife skills could possibly set up shop, but, he supposes, there _is_ something to be said for hiding in plain sight.

The building itself is one of those four-story brick-fronted places with a rusty fire escape, classic New York, and the shopfront on the ground floor is painted a matte black, one large glass window in the front with a three-foot-high number 9 picked out on it in gold paint. The lighting inside is soft, clusters of Chinese paper lanterns from what he can see from across the street. There’s a single wooden table in the window. Sitting on the table is a timeless paper-pulp egg carton with one speckled brown egg, and placed upside down next to it, a stainless-steel kitchen funnel.

Bucky runs through the address again in his mind, for the fifth time in as many minutes. Yes, this is the place. If it’s a money-laundering front, it’s pretty clever; he’s never seen anything like it before.

He crosses the street, swerving around a taxi and a delivery truck and a skateboarder with a death wish. He pushes the door open and walks inside. There’s a man wielding an ostrich-feather duster in the back right corner of the shop who immediately rushes over, tucks the duster under his arm, and says, enthusiastically, “Hi!” He has sleek dark hair and a brilliantly white smile and a piercing in his nose like a tiny silver half-moon. “What can I do for you?”

“Uh,” Bucky says, giving the place a quick once-over. The walls are covered with floor-to-ceiling shelving, each individual shelf holding one box, one bowl, one cup, or one cooking utensil. There are whisks and spatulas displayed on wooden stands, and colorful tins and bottles that must hold spices. There’s one large wooden table in the center of the room with four tall stools around it and a door at the back left, and nothing else.

“I’m Jamie Ross,” Bucky says, looking back at the man again. He’s about as tall as Bucky is, but much slimmer, and he’s wearing a black apron over black jeans and a black, soft-looking button-up with the sleeves rolled halfway up his slender forearms. “I’m here for the interview.”

“Oh,” the man says. “Ohhhh, okay, okay.” He turns half around and shouts over his shoulder. “Flan!” he yells. “That’s guy’s here for you!”

Then he turns back to Bucky again and gives him a slow up-and-down. “I’d hire you on the spot if it was up to me,” he says. “You’ve got the look down pat.” Bucky narrows his eyes, not sure what to think, but right at that moment, another man bangs through the swinging door that must lead to the back of the shop. He’s short and skinny, big round-framed glasses pushed up his nose, hair buzzed short around the sides and combed down in a long fringe over his forehead and dyed, inexplicably, lime green. He holds his right hand out straight in front of him tensely, like a lance, and says, “Jamie, I’m Flannery, my parents named me after the author because I’m from Mississippi and they’re cuckoo bananas, but don’t expect me to be all _Mississippi”_ —he puts the most outrageous Southern inflection on it that Bucky’s ever heard, but his accent is pure East Coast with a tinge of Brooklyn—“and don’t call me Flan, I hate it.”

“Flan’s all bark and no bite,” the other man puts in, and then shakes his head and tsks sadly. Flannery gives him the finger and a glare that pushes his glasses up further into his fringe. Bucky feels confused; he doesn’t remember the last time he was at such a loss, except for maybe the pickle incident, and that was two years ago. Who are these people? What is this place with its boxes and stools and countertops? Why would anybody name a child Flannery?

“Sorry,” Flannery is saying, “Diego thinks he’s funny. Diego, you’re fired. Jamie, let me show you around and then we can get started, yeah? Cool cool cool.” He turns around and breezes back through the door to the back of the shop, which swings shut behind him.

Bucky turns and looks at the man in the apron, who gives him another brilliant smile. “You get used to him,” he says.

When Bucky pushes open the door to the back of the shop, he’s momentarily startled by the contrast; the back room is tiled in bright white, with a big restaurant sink and a double-door refrigerator and six tables with stools. One wall is taken up with steel-pipe shelving stacked with translucent plastic boxes. Everything else is either chrome or stainless steel or slick, white subway tile. It looks like the kitchen of any reputable small restaurant in New York, _but it could also do double duty as an abattoir_ , he thinks, the Soldier murmuring in approval.

Flannery is sitting at one of the tables with a stack of papers in front of him. To his left is a big wooden butcher-block cutting board, an array of kitchen knives, and— _thank fuck_ —a pair of black nitrile gloves.

“Great great great, cool,” he says. “Sit down.” He gestures to the stool across from him. “Tell me a little about yourself, Jamie. Did you bring a resumé?” Bucky opens his mouth, but Flannery bowls right past him. “Of course you didn’t bring a resumé, it would have been the first thing you’d have shoved at me the moment you stepped in here, but that doesn’t matter because I’m looking for someone who’s got the skills, I don’t care if you’ve done an internship at El Bulli or just temped in food trucks. Anyway, like I said, tell me a little about yourself.”

Then he actually shuts his mouth and looks at Bucky expectantly from under his bright green fringe.

Bucky shifts uncomfortably on the cold stool. _What the fuck have I gotten myself into?_ he thinks, wondering again if maybe it would just be easier to knock over a few more of Hydra’s little popsicle stands and be done with it. This is clearly not an organization looking for an enforcer, and _definitely_ not an assassin. But as soon as he thinks it, his interior self shrugs and says, _Ehh, why not_. 

“Um,” he hums, trying to buy a little more time. “I’m Jamie Ross, I’m thirty-one years old, I’ve lived in New York my whole life, worked a lot of odd jobs.” He can’t think of what else to say. Why the fuck didn’t he put together a quick cover on the way here? Normally he’s just Jamie Ross, New Yorker, and nobody asks him any further questions. But this guy wants to know more than that. Of course he does, it’s a fucking job interview. _Shit._

“Okay Jamie, that’s cool, no worries, all I really need to know is that you have knife skills and you can teach other people your knife skills because we want to run classes here, did I already say that? I don’t think so. Anyway, and you need to have a bank account where I can set up a direct deposit.”

“Uh, yeah,” Bucky says. “Yeah, I do.” He has a dozen, under different names, although Jamie Ross isn’t one of them. He has bank accounts in offshore tax havens and in Canada and in Panama and in little New England credit unions. He has bank accounts coming out of his ears, although, at the moment, none of them have more than a hundred bucks in them. Which brings him back around to the reason why he’s here. “I have knife skills,” he says, sitting up straighter in his chair and smoothing a gloved hand over his hair. “But I’m not sure I have the kind of knife skills you’re looking for.”

“What kind of knife skills…” Flannery says, narrowing his eyes. Then he makes an obvious decision not to inquire any further. “Nevermind. I don’t care, as long as you can bone a fish and chop a carrot. Can you spatchcock a chicken?” he asks, almost suspiciously.

“Uh, yeah, yes,” Bucky says. He’s never spatchcocked a chicken before, but that doesn’t mean he’s never spatchcocked anything else. Surely the skills transfer.

And Bucky? Bucky has had a lot of free time on his hands in the last two years. And one of the things that he’s done with that free time is learn to cook. He’s mastered the basics and has pretty much maxed out the potential for his tiny two-burner kitchenette. So Bucky does happen to know his way around a knife, in the culinary sense.

“I can do all that. I can do anything you need, in the way of knives,” he says, trying to inject the right amount of confidence into his voice that will get him this job. “Do you need a demonstration?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s exactly what I was going to ask you to do next, we’ll start you with some veg and then you can move on to some meat. You didn’t bring your own knives, did you?” Flannery asks, leaning a little to glance around behind Bucky, looking for a bag he may not have noticed.

“Uh…” Bucky says, reaching with his gloved left hand automatically to the small of his back where his favorite knife sits snug in its sheath. Flannery narrows his eyes again and Bucky clears his throat, pulling his hand back around and clasping it together with the right on the polished metal tabletop. “No. I didn’t.”

“Hmm.” It’s the only thing Flannery says as he goes to the refrigerator, pulls open one side, and jerks open a gigantic crisper drawer. While his back is turned, Bucky hurriedly strips the glove off his left and hand pulls on one of the nitrile gloves. He flexes his fingers and makes a fist; they’re the good kind of gloves, thick enough that the gleam of metal doesn’t show through.

Flannery piles a few things into the crook of his arm and then comes back over to the table, lining up three carrots, an apple, and a tomato in front of him. Then he scoots the butcher block over in front of Bucky and pushes the knives into a clinking, clanking pile next to it.

Bucky grimaces, he can’t help himself. They may not be very good knives, but that’s no reason to treat them like a passel of pigs. He tries, as nonchalantly as possible, to separate them out on the tabletop so that none of their edges are touching. When he looks back up again, Flannery is watching him shrewdly, the beginnings of a smile in the faint crow’s feet around his eyes.

“Alright, Jaime,” he says, sitting up a little straighter, “first thing first, I want you to chop those carrots, small dice, julienne, and fine brunoise.” Then he clamps his mouth shut again. He’s obviously able to turn his volubility on and off at will, a skill that makes the ex-spy in Bucky a little jealous. What more perfect cover than an extrovert who can suddenly turn introverted?

Bucky looks down at the knives again and picks up a plain little utility knife. It has a wooden handle, well-worn, and a nice balance when he hefts it in his hand. He runs the edge of his right thumb down the blade; the point is chipped and there are burrs interrupting the file of its edge, but it’s sharp enough to do the job. Unable to resist, he spins it flat on his finger and then catches it again in the palm of his hand.

“Hmm,” is all that Flannery says, although the smile in his eyes has grown.

Bucky pulls the other glove on and picks up the first carrot and turns it over in his hand. It’s not peeled, and he knows he doesn’t actually need to peel carrots, but this small dice has to be perfect. So he sets the blade of the knife against the refrigerator-desiccated skin and proceeds to peel the whole thing in long, gauzy, golden-orange strips. Flannery has an eyebrow cocked now, looking impressed in spite of himself, and Bucky grins, just a little, on the inside. Maybe… maybe he can allow himself to have a little fun.

He cuts that carrot into perfect small dice, each tiny cube an exact replica of the others. The next gets julienned into identical matchsticks, and the third chopped into a uniform brunoise. The apple he peels from stem to blossom-end in one long, smooth, unbroken ribbon, and then cores and deseeds it, slicing it into crescents so thin they’re translucent. Then Flannery tells him to peel the tomato. He’s openly grinning now, enjoying the show that Bucky is putting on for him. Bucky has gotten into the swing of things and is punctuating his work with little knife flips and twirls, the tricks that he’d perfected during long stakeouts and then day after day of cooking dinner for himself, whistling along with the radio. He almost spins the knife on its point on the tip of his left forefinger but catches himself in time; there’s no way he’d be able to explain that away.

“Okay,” he says, picking up the tomato. “Do I get a water bath? A gas flame?”

“You could,” Flannery says, “but no.”

“Making me do it the hard way?” Bucky says, the grin in his interior showing through, just a little. He feels almost giddy at the unprecedented experience of smiling at a person that he wasn’t actually trying to scare shitless.

“Uh huh, absolutely, but from what I’ve seen I’m pretty sure that nothing is actually the hard way for you, not even giving you the worst of the worst, scrape-the-bottom-of-the-barrel, garbage knives to work with.” A little of the volubility is back.

Bucky frowns. “Don’t insult your knives like that. They’re the workhorses of your kitchen. They just need a little care. You have a whetstone? Or two or five?”

Flannery scoffs. “Of course we have whetstones, what kind of establishment do you take us for? And sure, you can sharpen my knives, but first you have to peel that tomato.”

Bucky picks up the sharpest knife in the bunch, a short, wickedly-curved little thing, and slowly peels the paper-thin skin off the tomato. It’s a little ragged and he’s taken a sliver of meat off in some places, but it’s the best he can possibly do without blanching.

“Perfect,” Flannery says, “Perfect, perfect, perfect. I think we can skip the rest. Cool cool cool. So, uh, do you have any teaching experience?”

“I—” The warmth in his chest turns icy cold. He sees, in his mind’s eye, a parade of little girls repeating the same jump over and over again, a faceless woman in a severe black dress with a riding crop tucked under her arm barking at them in Russian-accented French, himself called in to demonstrate the proper développé in a saut de chat. Later, he sees himself teaching the same group of little girls how to shoot through the excruciating pain of a broken trigger finger. Much later, there is another group, not Widows but Soldiers, and he—

He blinks, clearing his head, discarding those memories like he might discard yesterday’s newspaper in the waste bin, though the waste bin is more of a recycling center, shuffling the memories back into circulation no matter how hard he tries to suppress them. Flannery is still watching him, seeming not to notice that any time has passed.

“Yes, I have, actually. Ballet and self-defense, to children and adults.” It’s not a lie, exactly.

Flannery’s eyes widen fractionally, but he doesn’t say anything about Bucky’s unconventional job history. “How would you develop a lesson to teach a group of adults knife skills? Pretend I don’t know anything and I’m your first student.” He props his chin on his fists and bats his eyes like a technicolor cherub.

“Right. Um.” He can do this. He knows he can do this, he’s a fucking spy—or, rather, he was the fucking Soldier and one of his skill sets was spycraft, not that he ever got to use it much. And on top of that, he’s been living more-or-less undercover in New York for nearly two years, having conversations at the bodega and pretending to be a real person in public. Surely he can manage something.

“Right,” he says again, and then slips into a more friendly persona, as easily as changing one hat for another. “Hi, my name is Jamie, welcome to knife skills class.” He makes up a whole introduction on the fly, and then goes through the basics. He spreads the shitty test knives out on the table and names them: paring and utility knives, chef’s, fillet, serrated. He goes through each of their uses, and then the different cuts to make with each: julienne, bruinoise, chiffonade, slice, dice, chop. The ice in his chest has given way to warmth once again, and he’s having something adjacent to fun. Flannery makes all the appropriate noises, hamming it up, watching in wide-eyed wonder as if he’s never been so close to the business end of a knife before.

Finally, when Bucky is finished, Flannery claps his hands and says, “You’re hired.”

“But,” Bucky starts, aware again, all of a sudden, that this is a job interview and not just two friends messing around. _Two acquaintances_ , he corrects himself. He’s the ex-Fist of Hydra; he doesn’t have friends.

“No, no, no,” Flannery says, waving him off dismissively. “Your job history is a little shady, but whatever, you know your stuff, you’re perfect, you’re hired, come up front with me and we can sign the paperwork and talk about your hours and what you’ll be doing in your classes and I’ll introduce you properly to Diego, although he’s an asshole, maybe you don’t want to be introduced to him, but too bad, you’re gonna have to be ‘cause if you’re working here you’re gonna be seeing him all the time.” All of this comes out in one breath, more or less, and by the time Bucky has gathered enough wits to respond, the door to the front of the shop is swinging back and forth on its hinges and he’s alone in the big, shiny white kitchen.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/Hark_Bananas) and [Tumblr](https://harkbananas.tumblr.com/)!


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